Hashtags for curation: Saved by #OpenTeachingOU

Well, it is time to pause and say: WOW!!!!!!!!! The semester has gotten off to a fantastic start for me. I am seriously overenrolled in my classes (usually about 10% of people who are enrolled drop, and I plan on that... but, yikes, that has not happened this semester, so I am still at over 90 students right now)... but thanks to Inoreader and other improvements in my work flow, I think I should be able to cope. And it is going to be so exciting having all these people blogging, writing stories, sharing ideas. So many great students as always.

But........ BUSY. That overenrollment is definitely going to eat into the time I might normally have available for blogging and stuff.

Which is why I am so glad that I started using the #OpenTeachingOU hashtag.

In honor of Jim Groom and the Academic Tech Expo we had here earlier this month, I started using an #OpenTeachingOU hashtag at Twitter, at Google+, and also at my blogs, hoping that might be a way for those of us who are into open teaching to connect up with one another. That has not happened yet (although there was a seriously awesome post from Adam Croom in that spirit!) ... but even just using the hashtag for MY OWN CURATION has proved really useful. I haven't had any time to do any posting at this blog for the past week or so, but the #OpenTeachingOU hashtag does provide a glimpse into what I am thinking about and how things are going this semester so far!

I've created an #OpenTeachingOU OmniFeed page which shows all my posts with the tag (Google+, Twitter, blogs... and Pinterest too... although I don't think I've pinned anything for open teaching yet), and you can also see a standard Twitter hashtag widget in the sidebar of this blog. Isn't that cool? I love the way I can create these "omnifeeds" with Inoreader thanks to their Google+ and Twitter integration!

So, for those of you who are not interested in my Latin LOLCats and stories from India and random blah-blah-blah-whatever that shows up in my feed, the #OpenTeachingOU Omnifeed is for you, ha ha. It is a glimpse into my teaching eurekas... and a promise of blog posts to come.

Hashtags: they are powerful!

And I saw this infographic about history of hashtags thanks to Ian O'Byrne over at Google+ today. To be honest, hashtags kind of suck at Google+ (even if I am one of Google+'s biggest fans)... but I do use #OpenTeachingOU there too, in hopes that Google+ hashtag culture might improve.

And someday........ someday.......... I will get up on all the posts I am behind at this blog, ha ha.